US Army's Antarctic Tunnel Project

1960s the US Army had a plan to bore a tunnel into the wall

But they didn't have a boring machine that could handle the super cold temperatures

So they had a whole testing project in Greenland where they developed ice tunnels and invented new boring machines

That could operate in super cold temperatures

So this was back when they were going into forming NASA and all the other things

That were kind of strange the Antarctic Treaty around that time

Pretty close to it and he says like they did this whole big thing in Greenland for just practice

So it's like they were practicing to bore into the sky ice and once they had the new boring machine figured out

They brought it to the wall in Antarctica

He said that the machine bored a tunnel at five or ten miles into the wall

but that they never broke through the other side of the wall and

That they still don't know how thick the wall is even to this day

First the floor of the tunnel was solid rock

But after a mile or two in the floor was sky ice

Like it was sky ice underneath after a certain point

And apparently the wall slowly builds itself back up after you cut it because after a year or so the tunnel had shrunk smaller

All by itself like a self-healing wound it starts closing up

they had to leave the boring machine inside the wall because the tunnel shrunk too small to get it back out and

After a few decades the tunnel was completely gone

Like the part of the wall was solid again

He said that now the scientists were trying to use technology to figure out how thick the wall is

He said something about putting

earthquake sensors all along the wall and

That somehow you could measure the signal from an earthquake to see how thick the wall is

But I didn't think it was a big deal at the time, but then a few weeks ago

I saw a map of the wall in Antarctica

Except the map was all flat and crazy-looking and it showed the wall going all the way up over the whole earth